True Storytelling - You yourself must be true and prepare the energy and effort for a sustainable future

To be honest I don’t believe in methods – I believe in flow and creativity and therefore it is so interesting that in the True Storytelling principles* it is called the 7 principle anti-tools – as there is no intention to come up with a specific tool but only a wish to create guidance and a path that can help people and organizations in navigating in their own Journey.

In this post and the following 6 posts, you will find a mixture of my own True Story and Guidance to Healthcare Entrepreneurs.

It was Jens Larsen, one of the Founders of True Storytelling that approached me: AM I think you should participate and from the first moment I was captivated – I had found my way home.

The first principle “You yourself must be true and prepare the energy and effort for a sustainable future”* is about finding what is true and ethical to you and the world. How can you be true to yourself and at the same time do good for others.

In my own story, I had to go through a path of thinking and experiencing I should build an ordinaire Marketing Agency within Healthcare to discovering what my true wish was. It was not only to help them finding their story and communicate it but also to see my clients grow and excel not only as a company but also as individuals – and the latter was just as important to me as the first.

Along with that journey came a tremendous learning in experiencing my company almost falling apart to face all the challenges in the world and rebuild it.

In the beginning of starting my own company I led others lead me. The opposite of principle 1, you yourself most be true. I chose to listen to others and chose their given advice almost blindly. I ignored my own intuition and own desire. This is the worst thing you can do in Business, in Life. You will always fail in the end choosing this path as it goes against your heart – and it is in your heart you find the truth of you. The inner core of being.

I know I am not the only one that has faced the consequences of going against your own heart.

I once heard a story from a small Danish company within HealthTech. They had a product that could help many people. It was simple, it was easy. They had chosen a clear business-strategy. They would go B2B Business-to-Business (B2B) – they had found the partners they wanted to collaborate with the patientorganizations – everything was there and they had slowly started building the first cases.

They then landed 3 investors. The 3 investors came from a B2C-environment.Business-to-Consumer-(B2C) environment. They were convinced that this was the right way to go. They had within 6 months changed the entire company. All the direction was now towards B2C – all communication was now B2C – and they went through all the marketing channels to push a B2C business. But the company was built up as a B2B-market – all the cases were built on a B2B. The Founders felt sad and lost their energy and passion. 9 months after the Investors had entered the company it went bankrupt. The sales never came, all the money was spent on endless B2C-advertising and the heart of the company was gone.

The Founder told me, that if the Founding Team only had stuck to their passion, their belief and not had led anyone else tell them what to do, the company perhaps would still have existed.

The product was handed over to another company that believed in the B2B-solution and is today a thriving business.

I believe that everything is based on Energy. If you don’t bring the energy that you believe in yourself, then naturally this will spiral to people not believing in your product as well. If you don’t believe how should they believe. Within this a major ability comes a play. The truth.

What is the truth? When you go within and find your intention behind all your actions – you find into the truth.

I involved myself in 2 projects along my business-start. The intentions were not the right one, I didn’t follow my truth, I didn’t combine my head and heart and now I can see that is why they had to end as they had to.

The first one was based on the sole intention to help others based on the experience I had personally gained. You often see this after people go through tough times. They wish to use the experience they have gained to help others, therefore many become coaches after a hard time in their personal life. This is admirable and was what I wanted to do as well. I wanted to make sure that more people could be helped. But I stepped into an area where I had no professional experience, I only gave with my heart and my own experience. Even though my intensions were pure I did it with a mindset of pure heart and when I then attracted wrong partners to the project not with any professional experience it was doomed to fail, which it did. If I had known my truth. I would have known that in the project, there was no passion for me, nothing were I could support with my professional experience and truly live out all that is me.

The second project was based on the intention to help a friend. I wanted him to succeed, and I thought that if I engaged in the project he would. It was exactly the same as project number one. I engaged with an intention purely based from my heart but where I could not find my professional passion and could not support with professional experience as the project was too complicated for me to comprehend. I tried and invested. Also here I got the wrong partners into the project and it failed.

If I here had known my truth. I should have kept myself out of helping my friend so far and focused on what my own passion and drive.

When I decided to close down the 2 projects and only focus on my main focus Storytelling, Branding and Marketing within Healthcare. New projects arose from nowhere. I suddenly found myself engaged in projects I loved, where I could find passion and joy. It gave me energy and I could create.

When it comes to Principle 1, your yourself must be true – a very important step being an Entrepreneur is embracing where you are in the moment, where you are.

There is something inside all Entrepreneurs in the beginning they do not wish to say how small they are. They build up webpages, pretending everything big and grand. Often get help from advertising agencies and create beautiful logos, the framework is beautiful, but it has no depth. I know exactly the feeling. How can anyone possible think I am interesting or have anything to offer just being myself. I need to pretend that I am big, that it is a big organization. It almost fake it until you make it – method. That method has just in my opinion one enormous set-back “ You loose all that is authentic about you” and suddenly it becomes more and more difficult to navigate in the relations you have built, the story you tell.

Suddenly you feel like a main character in the play that you yourself have created and there is no peace to be find within as you run and run trying to empress everyone and measure up to their expectations.

It is a race, that you cannot win. The race against yourself will burn you out. The day I decided to be 100 % authentic and just be me not trying to build up the next Coca Cola was the day I sat myself free.

I remember the conversations before then. The way I was before then. How important it was for me to emphasize that we were a huge team, that we had huge companies, name-dropping all that actually in the end just leads to one thing. Loosing the true purpose of why I started my company. I started it as I wished to make a difference. I started it as I had seen from all the big companies I had been in how you build up a brand and how you create a story and I wanted to help more companies than just one with that task.

But creating a story working against the stream, will only bring you more and more challenges. More and more resistance.

I suddenly found myself in a situation, where nothing what I loved was left. It took a deep breathe. It took courage to start all over from what I had built and find into the core again. The freedom I found when I did that. The success I reached when I did that. I can only describe it as I finally felt I could breathe again and just be.

This is the story I see played over and over again by the Entrepreneurs crossing my path. And they all ask the same question but where do I start?

And the reply is simple and the same:

You need to go back to when you found out that you suddenly had found a solution to something that could help others. You have to go back to the fundamental feeling of how it felt and from there on build evidence. The first path you have to cross is relations. You have to find the people that can help you bringing evidence by testing and trying your idea -and that is the hardest because no one wants to be number one trying and testing, they ask for others experience before they themselves wish to test and try.

It wasn’t until I found the importance of you being able to tell your true authentic story and believe in it so you can tell it to others I could see how it ruins so many potential ideas just due to the fact that the Entrepreneur themselves simply didn’t believe in themselves in their own product.

And if they believe in it then they often try to tell the same story to everybody, but the same story doesn’t apply to everybody. You have to find a niche and you have to go with all your focus into that niche and create from there.

I had a case with a company that had built an IT-solution that could apply to all companies. The Founder came from the LifeScience Industry and it was from that industry he had gained all his knowledge but he offered the solution to all industries and did not go in depth to one specific industry. When I gathered all the data and information I could find about him and the reason why he had developed the IT-Solution, we found a beautiful story. It was a story of integrity of helping others, of knowing so much within the LifeScience industry that his IT-solution could benefit patients in the end as products could be launched faster due to his solution. He knew the language of LifeScience and could talk these specific terms to create trust and authencity. When he spoke, people listened as he spoke from his heart, his head and his dreams.

When he found the niche to his IT-Solution and held his focus, things started to appear. Suddenly there was a situation in the Industry that called for his product and he then quickly attracted attention to the partners and business relations he needed.

He went through being a man with an idea to building the right relations to building the evidence and this is the path that will lead to sales and from there on you just build upon experience.

People need to feel you in order to listen to you. If they cannot feel the passion, the authencity, the depth, you have about what it is you have to offer them, you will not get anywhere.

The more authentic you can get about your story, the better it will get, the more people will listen.

And the more authentic you as an Entrepreneur can be about yourself – well I dare to say the more happy you will get with life as you will see it becomes a flow.

I met a young woman, she had founded a company, she was so bright, so intelligent. Her idea was out-standing and she had people cheering for her. She won one competition after another but things went too fast she built her foundation on sand instead of solid bricks and when you build and build on sand and the wind get harder and harder, one day the building will crash and it did. She could no longer measure up to people expectations. It all became too much, too fast paced, too here and now.

We have to remember that Life is a Journey -all the relations we encounter are here to help us along the way and they are either a lesson or a blessing.

I have met so many people trying to give me a lesson, that one of the Business Advisors I once met said. You have experienced more in one year than others experience as a Leader in 10.

Today, when I look back I can only smile because it indeed has been very very hard lessons but due to my profession as a Guide within Storytelling, Branding and Marketing I can use all of my lessons and own stories to advice, navigate and support other entrepreneurs not to try all the things I had to encounter.

One of the most striking things in all of my lessons has been that I didn’t listen to my intuition. If I had listened to my intuition I would have had a different experience. But I closed it down, didn’t listen to my own voice, to my own story – I listened to others.

I went so far, to believe the story others created around me. Just to one day wake up and find out – that the story that they told was not true it had nothing to with reality.

I woke up to find my logo had a different colour than the original one, the softness, the lightness, the spiritual part of my company was gone and was replaced by cold colours, icons, sterile. There was absolutely nothing left of my True Storytelling – it was all gone and replaced by an illusion that wasn’t me.

I had to let it all go and start all over. Take everything and ask myself but whom am I? And I know for sure whom I am now. I am a True Storyteller. I wish to find the authencity, the flow, the warmth, the passion in all the Entrepreneurs I meet – and help them along the path to believe in themselves, in their stories, in their solutions.

*The 7 principles are from the book True Storytelling, Seven Principles For An Ethical and Sustainable Change-Management Strategy by Jens Larsen, David M. Boje and Lena Bruun.

Anne-Marie Hall became a certified Trainer by the True Storytelling Institute in February 2021.

Amazing Hall helps Healthcare Entrepreneurs and Executives through a mixture of storytelling and strategic marketing guidance to navigate in their journey.